Naveen’s Blog

I am already using Andrew Spencer’s YouTube video downloader script to run my own YouTube video downloading site. Now this article shows you the way to download streaming video from LiveLeak in an FLV format.

What is LiveLeak?
Liveleak, based in the UK, is a website that lets users post and share videos, similar to sites like YouTube, but it allows some sexual content and emphasizes reality-based footage such as war scenes from various parts of the world, grisly accidents, executions, and crimes. – Wikipedia

Why I went to LiveLeak?
I was searching for educational autopsy videos in Google and I got link to a video shared on LiveLeak. I searched for the term “Autopsy” in LiveLeak and surprised to see number of videos, which aren’t available in any of video-sharing sites. Hey….don’t see the videos if you have a weak heart .

So….let’s start the hacking. We need Firefox (I forgot IE and permanently deleted it from my XP ), Greasemonkey Firefox extension, and LiveLeak Greasemonkey user script.

What is this Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way web pages look and function. It’s a tiny extension that does wonders. Just head over to userscripts.org to see what Greasemonkey can do.

First, install the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Official homepage of Greasemonkey: http://www.greasespot.net/

Restart the browser and you will see a monkey icon on the status bar of the Firefox.

Then, go the LiveLeak Greasemonkey user script page here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6442 On the right side, you will see the link “Install this script.” Click that and it will popup a screen like this:

Click the “Install” button, and you are done. Now, you are ready to download the videos from LiveLeak. Go to any video page and you will see a download link like this.

Right click on it and select the option “Save Link As” to save the video to your desktop. You can use Wimpy standalone tiny FLV player or VLC Player to play the FLV video.

written by Naveen